The Shoebox Full of Box Scores

I pounded the steering wheel so hard I set off the horn, and Jeff, two fields over in the other tractor, called me on the two-way to ask what was wrong.

When I got to the end of the row, I picked up the little notepad I kept on the dash for writing down seed lot numbers. It had the feed store’s name on the top of every page.

I wrote, “Line drive to right. Radio says the kid has quick hands. Planting the Johnson eighty.” I wrote the inning. I did not know why I was writing it. I just did not want to lose it.

That Wednesday the county paper came in the mail like it did every week. The sports page ran a box score for every high school game in the county, small print, the names and the at-bats and the hits.

There he was. Albrecht, 2B, 3 AB, 1 H.

I got Lori’s good scissors out of the drawer and cut it out, and I sat at the kitchen table and copied my notes from the feed-store pad into the white space beside it, in pencil, small, so it would fit.

At the bottom, without thinking about it, I wrote, “Good job, bud.”

Lori came in from the garden and found me at the table with the scissors and that little scrap of newspaper. She looked over my shoulder for a long time.

“You should show him that,” she said.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s for me.”

“Ron, he’d want to know you were listening.”

“Listening isn’t the same as being there,” I said. “A boy wants to look up in the stands and see his dad. He doesn’t want a clipping. Don’t make a thing of it, Lori. Please.”

She did not make a thing of it. That is the kind of woman she is.

She asked me, once, if I was sure, and I said I was sure, and she let me be a stubborn man in peace, which is a kindness I have not always deserved.

After that it was a habit. If I was in the field and the game was on, the radio was on. I learned the announcer’s voice better than I knew some of my cousins.

He said “rope” for a line drive and “a can of corn” for an easy fly, and when Travis did something good, he always said the whole name, Travis Albrecht, like he was proud of him too.

If I was planting, I wrote at the end of the row. If I was spraying, I wrote when I stopped to fill.

Once, I wrote on the back of my hand with a pen because the notepad had slid down between the seat and the door, and I copied it off my hand at supper.

Every Wednesday, the paper came. Every Wednesday, I cut the box score out and wrote the margin. Every margin ended the same way.

I kept them in a plain old cardboard shoebox, from the pair of work shoes I bought the year Travis was born. Lori’s good scissors lived in that box too, after a while, because she got tired of hunting for them.

Three seasons. Sophomore, junior and senior year. The paper ran a box for every game, home and away. When I counted them, years later, there were 63.

Some of them I wrote a lot on. Some of them only had a line.